[tad1214]

So, after playing around with a few Linux distributions such as Untangle, Endian, IP Cop, etc, I decided I wanted to make my own gateway with FreeBSD.

Here is what I am planning to do with it:
NAT/PAT
DHCP
Firewall - Including blackholing port scanners for X amount of time
Port Forwarding
Caching
DNS
IPSec VPN for site to site and Clients
IDS/IPS

Possibly a Web-GUI in the future, but being I know nothing about PHP this may be a ways out.

I would like to do inline Anti-virus similar to Untangle. Not sure how I am going to do this yet... But thats why I am doing it myself to learn!

Here is what I am planning to use:
Built in FreeBSD routing for NAT/PAT and well, routing.
PF for Firewall and Port Forwarding?
Squid for Caching
DJB-DNS for DNS (tinydns)
Not sure on DHCP yet
OpenVPN for IPSec VPNs
Obviously Apache (maybe now is a good time to learn Light-httpd?) for webgui
MRTG for stats monitoring
Snort for IDS/IPS

This sounds like a big dream, but I would like to someday make this into a port that goes and installs all needed apps (listed above) and gets all needed configs/files from another server. Maybe some day an installer CD with this pre-configured? Who knows.

I always figured the best way to learn anything is to have a reason to learn it. Whenever someone tells me they want to learn Linux or FreeBSD, I ask them what do they want to do with it? Just casual desktop use? Make a web server? Otherwise people have a tendency to just install it and never use it again. If you have a goal, you know what to look for/learn.

Any pointers/tips from more experienced people?

Thanks!
-=Tom